The Reading Experience

New Review

My review of Shelley Jackson's Riddance, at Full Stop:

If Riddance is truly a book about the paranormal (“necrophysics,” as Sybil Joines would have it), we could say it implicitly portrays the way language is haunted by its own ghostly origins and the now-spectral uses to which it has been put in the past. The same is true, of course, of literature itself, which continues to embody a living force only after the writer’s reckoning with all of the dead forms it has assumed in the past.

Sinking or Swimming

In an interview with Lit Hub (for its "Secrets of the Book Critics" series), Madeleine Schwartz asserts that 

Broadly speaking, the internet has been terrible for book criticism and book critics. Book reviews have been shuttered and magazines have folded. It’s nearly impossible to make a living writing criticism, which in turn means that authors with books out can only sink or swim. The excitement about new online venues has been heartening, but unless the economics of reviewing changes, the profession only has about five years to live. . . .

Perhaps Ms. Schwartz is predominantly thinking of the low, or absent, payment book reviewers can expect when she claims "the internet has been terrible for book criticism and book critics," although she would then be referring mostly to the latter. However, that entirely legitimate concern does not at all justify a claim that the internet has been damaging to criticism, considering either its quality or its visibility. Literary blogs and online book review sites, as well as some online literary magazines, have over the past 15 years greatly supplemented the serious discussion of new books that previously took place solely in print newspapers and magazines. (These sites have also made possible a complementary discussion of not-so-new books that did not much exist at all in the newspapers and magazines.) They have also enhanced the coverage of translated books, which still get minimal coverage in print. There are in addition many more longer-form reviews and extended critical essays than were ever allowed to appear in other than the most resolutely "intellectual" of print magazines. Anyone who thinks the shuttering of newspaper book reviews has diminished the availability of informed criticism devoted to the purposeful consideration of books and literature just doesn't know where to look.

It is almost certainly true that "It’s nearly impossible to make a living writing criticism," and equally true that some of even the best of the online book review publications don't pay their reviewers, a regrettable state of affairs. Further, it is arguably the case that the internet was terrible for writers whose primary review outlets were the newspapers and magazines that scaled back if not eliminated books and arts coverage--as well as other "frills"--because their readership in general declined in competition with online media. But the general nostalgia expressed by critics like Schwartz for the golden days when critics could make a living from writing print-based reviews and literary journalism seems to me misplaced, if not an outright fantasy. I am unaware of many general-interest book reviewers and critics--even the iconic ones, from Edmund Wilson or Elizabeth Hardwick in a much older generation of critics to John Leonard or Helen Vendler in a more recent one--who were able to subsist on reviewing alone. Most had teaching jobs or worked in editorial or publishing positions. Perhaps some could use book reviewing to supplement income from writing books.

The sum of money paid for newspaper and periodical reviews, however, surely could not alone support a professional career in criticism. Even today, it is hard to imagine that the few hundred dollars a book review might provide could be sustained consistently enough to actually contribute a great deal to a "living" as a critic (an actual critic, and not a lifestyle journalist or ersatz book publicist). To say the least, I am pleased when I receive payment for reviews and criticism I write. But I never thought that writing literary criticism was a lucrative career move, and I don't believe that criticism will die in five years. Some things are worthwhile in and of themselves and don't require affirmation  through their market exchange value.

Still Inside That Book

In her response to listening to a reading given by John Dos Passos at the 92nd Street Y in 1965, Lydia Davis reflects on her own reading of Dos Passos as a formative experience:

The Dos Passos book, whichever one it was, was also the first, or early, in the long list of books that I never finished reading. A book whose story captivated me, I would finish. A book which, on the other hand, excited or inspired me by the way it was written, I usually would not. I would read just enough to absorb the nature of the book, understand the approach, become excited by the texture of the writing, and then I would put the book aside. I don’T think this was mere laziness, or distraction. There is a real difference between a book unfinished and a book read to the end. A book read to the end gives one a clear idea of the whole of the book, the overall structure and full content, and that is one sense of a book, a more complete sense, you might say. But a book unfinished allows you to feel you are forever afterward still inside that book, that you are part of it, live in it, continue the experience of it, and that its further continuation and conclusion remain forever mysterious.

I cannot say I have deliberately left many good books--books providing a gratifying reading experience--unfinished for the reasons Davis describes here. However, those reasons strike me as entirely cogent, especially when contrasted with finishing books and getting "a clear idea of the whole of the book" if "clarity" is understood not as knowing "what happened" in the end but as achieving something like interpretive closure, fully grasping what a literary work is supposed to "mean." A book that leaves the impression of such clarity is likely just a book that won't be worth rereading--its value as literature has been used up.

Obviously this indicates that I don't regard the "literary" as residing in what is left over after reading--call it "meaning" or "lesson" or "wisdom" or what have you--but as something that makes itself present during the reading experience itself. I would feel that I am not fully appreciating the work as a literary achievement if I voluntarily stopped reading it--except when I can already judge it a very bad book. But I must confess that in the time after I have finished reading a poem, story, or novel I often (actually almost always) do allow the particulars, beyond, say, the major characters in a novel, the broad contours of situation and story (although not really the plot details), as well as the general formal and stylistic character, to fade from memory. This is not the consequence of a porous memory but the recognition that no one reading of a literary work is authoritative, or even stable, and that a subsequent reading would not be mere repetition of the initial experience. It would be neither inferior nor superior to that first reading but a new opportunity for the "literary" to be discovered.

I have sometimes upon rereading had not simply my judgment of a particular book altered but my fundamental orientation to it transformed. It's not just that my view of a character changes or I understand particular episodes more fully or I find the writer's style more, or less, impressive: the book seems so dissimilar from what my memory retains of it that it could be called a wholly different book. (I had this experience rereading James Purdy's Malcolm--which I have since reread again--after reading it for the first time in college, when I was unable to "identify" with its protagonist; in my second reading it seemed to me something like a masterpiece in the way it made identification with the protagonist beside the point, a kind of MacGuffin, to use Hitchcock's term.) More often I just "see" things in a rereading I didn't see the first time, enough so that it is as if I actually haven't read the book before and must assess its literary qualities anew. Even then, my renewed appreciation of the work's aesthetic accomplishment must remain contingent, since a subsequent rereading might again readjust my perception of it.

Perhaps this process resembles Davis's attempt to "continue the experience" of the book she leaves unfinished, but it in fact presumes not a single experience of a literary work but multiple separate and autonomous experiences. It is possible to say that after multiple readings of a particular book that I have learned to read it better (but not necessarily), although other factors contribute to this as well--familiarity with the writer's other work, reading more widely in general, etc. Of course, it is not possible ultimately to reread every worthy book. Still, I would maintain that the best way to achieve the state of feeling "still inside that book" is to assume the first reading will not be the last.

Radical Realism

My essay on current conceptions of realism in American fiction, specifically focused on the fiction of Sam Pink, is now available at 3:AM Magazine:

For the most part, “realism” in current discussions of fiction has become conflated with conventional narrative practice: “storytelling” employing the orthodox “elements” of fiction as developed in that latter 19th and early 20th centuries. While in American literary history at least, the rise of realism in this period did bring a change in the kinds of subjects addressed (more “ordinary” characters), in setting (less familiar sorts of places, made to seem “real” in the kind of description involved), and in the stories told (fewer stories about haunted mansions or demoniac white whales), as well as in the manner of telling (less grandiloquent, but also less stylistically dynamic), in both the new realism and the old romanticism writers ultimately perceived their task to be relating a story recognizable as such according to accepted dramatic form—elucidated perhaps most memorably by Gustave Freytag in his famous “pyramid.”. . . Continue